Enemy creation and Animation

Creating a Character

The players character is Dracula who has come to this western town and has wrecked havoc creating blood shed and death in his wake. Because of this nuisance the resident cowboys are fed up and demand that he face a court to answer for his crimes. It is your job as the player to escape these cowboys and the western village. The cowboys in the game will be armed with guns to shoot the player and cause harm whereas the vampire doesn't have a weapon as he finds this chase to be more of a game than a life or death situation.

So I already decided to use the vampire I drew for the main concept art of the game. So I decided to draw some for the cowboy. I used the reference board I made and created a small chibi version of the cowboy.

This art helped me work out the kind of look I wanted for my enemy to have. I struggled a lot with working so small since I like to add extra details. For some reason I felt extremely confined trying to work on the character in Photoshop so I decided one developing outside of Photoshop. 

I don't think the coat of the cowboy would work seeing as the game is rather muted and it may drown the cowboy out, having too many browns. I tried to use less saturated colours because of the fact that I wanted to set more of a mood with the game and I don't think that having loud colours for everything really works out. 

I originally created many animation states with the cowboy in order for it to have similar frames as the player. However, I couldn't add these due to me not knowing code. 

These animation states I believe wouldn't have worked that well anyways. I find the robotic movement works rather well for the cowboy to be enemy looking. The overall look works better for the enemy so that means that it works better.

Player creation and animation

Animating and Creating the Player

Next I made the vampire and focused on bringing the more realistic illustration I did and changing it to be pixel art. The fact I used so many monochrome tones made the variation of his clothes rather difficult. I think that there is a difference but also a similarity of the sprites so this allows them to look more like they belong together but are also different characters. In the game the vampire also appears more pale. 

For the vampires movement I wanted something a bit more unique so I decided to make his movements as a bat, this also makes sense as he is trying to run away from the cowboy so having the sprite become a bat would mean for faster movement. To help with this I watched a few videos on bats flying in slow motion and this gave me some ideas on how exactly the silhouette would look  for my creation of the bat. I did some brief doodles of the positions of the bat for the animations I would need seeing as the wings would be the most difficult part to illustrate having these little sketches gave me a basic idea on how it should look. 

The first frame of the bats left and right movement was then created and from there the variations were generated.

Here are all the states of the bat. I think having this feature makes the game slightly more unique and helps with the narrative that I wanted. 

I developed some hit animations for each state of the player, I created these by inverting the designs and created animations switching between the hit state and the first state for each animation. 

Creating the environment

Creating the environment

For the first level's environment I wanted to make it within a dessert terrain so that meant a rather bland looking image however I tried to make the desert fleshed out with plants and different't things that may be found within a desert. This allowed me to experiment with different items however I also wanted to have the western village somehow fit within the scene and so I will have to somehow work through to get this.

I originally made my environment to be very open and planned to have lots relating to the wild west but this changed slightly as I made the assets. This is due to me realising such an open world wouldn't really work with the type of game I was designing. The different was

I decided to change the layout of my level to a more maze like design. Because of this I changed my assets for my game to include more collide able objects so that the maze was harder to complete. This will then lead to the door I have created which I am hoping to animate and make lead to another level. This door will hopefully be programmed by me after watching some tutorials on how to complete the task. I wanted to end the first level with entering a saloon that the second level will be based in.

I also included an Easter egg of one of my friends as a raccoon and this can be seen within the first level.

I wanted to create some slight changes with the environment assets and this meant that I had to change up a few things.

Level select and Pause menus

Creation of the level select menu

When creating the level select menu I wanted to do a rather moody image which showed more of the vampire and the setting that he was in. So I figured that drawing a saloon would show off the western setting well and pairing this with a vampire drinking blood at the saloon will make for a more Dracula themed image.

I wanted the level buttons to be separated from the image itself so it gave more of a clean and clear design, I decided to do a more detailed image and to have the level select not be a part of this because of how it may confuse the eyes.

I chose to illustrate the same vampire from the concept art I made as I felt he suited the feel of the game well and having a constant look of that vampire will be good for my game as I am thinking of making the player the same vampire.

This was the original idea I had in terms of placement and the image itself.

When designing the main image I came across a few snags in terms of the illustration of the vampire with pixel art I struggled to create his features and make them look like a humans so I decided to make less as more and just used a few pixels to make his features as I felt this would work best for the image.

     Here are some work in progress shots of the level select backdrop.

This week I also created a focus on the level select buttons. Since all my font is hand-drawn I felt that having text as well as the number on the button would be too much and so I decided to just complete the numbers to make them more clear and understandable.

For the background of the button, I wanted something to make them stand out more against the background they were on but also help it work with the image so I tried to make some that were rounded rectangles and to outline these with white so that they would fit the theme of the font and the other menu buttons.

For the pause menus I kept to the same font but made it slightly longer and thinner, for the pause menu I made a resume, menu and quit button. The menu button I also used within the level select screen to save time and to have that link from the level select screen to the menu for ease of access for the player.

Next week I will focus on character creation and asset creation as all my menus are now complete!